Posts Tagged ‘triangulation’

Getting rid of comrade Corbyn will take patience

17/11/2015, 11:02:47 PM

by Atul Hatwal

Years from now, politics students will be told jokingly by their tutors about the time the Labour leader had to U-turn and admit that a suicide bomber, who was about to blow himself up, should in fact be shot by the police.

It will be a salutary tale of what happens when an individual characterized by extremes of incompetence and ideology, is put in charge of a political party.

Many MPs think that the madness cannot continue. That Corbyn will fall in the next six months, or at the latest, after poll disaster in next year’s regional and local elections.

Sadly, they are wrong.

Before Corbyn falls, three changes are needed, none of which are immediate: the soft left need to wake-up to what’s happening, new terms of trade are required within Labour’s internal debate and a viable alternative leader must emerge.

Westminster Standard Time and Greenwich Mean Time are wholly different concepts.

In the political bubble, new notions become conventional wisdom within two or three turns of a super-accelerated Twitter fueled news cycle.

But what might seem suddenly eye-rollingly obvious in Westminster has barely registered outside.

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What the Lib Dem response to the News of the World meltdown tells us about the government’s political strategy

08/07/2011, 08:29:12 AM

by Atul Hatwal

For the moment, all eyes are on News International. Over the coming days, the focus will broaden as the political implications start to be fully felt.

At this stage, it’s difficult to tell definitively what the political fall-out will be, but one small political development has become apparent which will potentially have major consequences for Labour.

Note the position of the Lib Dems. They’ve staked out a distinctly more hawkish stance than Cameron, calling for tougher action, Rebekah Brooks’ resignation and a judge-led enquiry.

This follows on from a few weeks where Cameron and Clegg, last year’s political love birds, have been engaged in some seemingly sharper public exchanges.

The new mood was first evident on June 20th, when David Cameron subjected himself to the forensic questioning of Steve Wright in the afternoon on radio 2.

Out of the blue, he broke new political ground when he said that the Tories would have been tougher on immigration and welfare without the Lib Dems.

Apparently piqued, Clegg fired back two days later on his visit to Brazil saying that without the Tories the Lib Dems would have been tougher on the banks.

Looking at the change in tone, it’s easy to view this as a part of a linear process that starts with flowers in the Number 10 garden and ends in a bitter split. The New Statesman‘s Rafael Behr declared,

With the prime minister now attacking his deputy openly on the radio, it’s clear that the early truce is over. How will the two parties convince voters that coalition is still a viable option for 2015“?

The Lib Dem position on hacking would seem to back this up. It has certainly been written up as such.

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